Overview

He used to relish putting suspects in jail, but in his latest case, Luke Garrison—now a defense attorney—will stop at nothing to save a man accused of murder

During a sleepover with her two friends, Emma goes missing. The owners of a local news network, her parents have money and power. As the police scour the city, Emma’s father offers a $250,000 reward for his daughter’s safe return. Eight days after the abduction, two hikers find her. Emma has been dead for days.

After a year’s fruitless search, the police make an arrest, picking up the network’s star anchorman. As Emma’s father brays for blood, Luke Garrison is the only person who dares to stand in his way. Once a merciless District Attorney, Luke became a defender after mistakenly sending a man to the gas chamber. Now he will let no one—not even a bereaved father—rush justice. But is he doing the right thing, or is he fighting to set a killer free?

Editorial Reviews

Plenty of twists and turns in this portrait of corruption and evil in a small town.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After forays into the coming-of-age (The Obstacle Course) and PI (House of Smoke) genres, Freedman seems to have settled back, with last year's Key Witness and this new novel, into the sort of rambunctious legal thriller that made his reputation with his debut, Against the Wind. That book has been his high water mark, critically and commercially, and his new novel is unlikely to match it, despite a powerful premise, exciting plotting both in and out of the courtroom and Freedman's usual muscular prose. The opening here is immensely gripping: a teenage girl is apparently kidnapped from her Santa Barbara, Calif., bedroom during a slumber party, her wealthy family deals with the devastation of her disappearance, her body is found and, a year later, a hotshot TV newscaster is arrested for the killing. Freedman handles this sensitive material--obviously inspired by the real-life kidnap-slaying of Polly Klass--freshly and with appropriate gravity. He takes a turn toward the routine, however, when he introduces his hero, attorney Luke Garrison, whose very contrariness--he's a former DA who has fled to the woods in shame over a past failure, who rides a hog and sports a goatee and a ruby stud in his ear--makes him just one more dashing antihero. Luke agrees to defend the newscaster, plunging himself and his hot-blooded girlfriend/assistant into an adrenalized investigation and trial full of false leads, twists and brushes with death, all of which Freedman handles skillfully, other than pointing a blatant finger at the dead girl's father as the real culprit. So the ultimate unmasking of the killer comes as no big surprise, although Freedman's lurid handling of it is surprising--and, some might say, exploitative, as this talented writer turns what begins as a worthy re-imagining of a brutal tragedy into a histrionic page-burner. Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Mystery Guild selections. (Oct.)

Library Journal

In the latest from the best-selling author of courtroom thrillers, a former prosecutor, devastated after learning that he has sent an innocent man to his death, reluctantly returns to court to defend a TV newscaster accused of murdering a teenaged girl.

Lesley Dunlap

I have enjoyed other J. F. Freedman books including Against the Wind and Key Witness. His plots are well-crafted, the suspense is taut, and he gets the legal details right....One of the author's trademarks is that his heroes are flawed and difficult to like....In spite of a slow beginning, once the story gets going it is impossible to put down. Fans of legal thrillers will want to check out The Disappearance. The Mystery Reader.com

Kirkus Reviews

Routine by-the-numbers legal procedural by one of the better craftsmen of the genre. Freedman (Key Witness) applies his formulaburned-out legal eagle takes a case that no one else wantsto the luxurious California suburb of Montecito, where bubbly 14-year-old Emma Lancaster is snatched out of her bedroom by a mysterious intruder. Her father, Doug, the somewhat boorish owner of local television stations, and her slightly ditsy society mom, Glenna, are horrifiedespecially when Emma's rotting corpse appears in a nearby stream. The cops are mystified until the dead girl's key chain turns up in the backseat of a Porsche belonging to Joe Allison, a womanizing local newscaster who works at one of Doug's TV stations. Only circumstantial evidence ties Allison to the crime, until the girl's friends reveal that Emma was pregnant when murdered and that Allison is the likely father. With everyone in southern California screaming for Allison's head, Luke Garrison, a former crusading Santa Barbara district attorney who lost his career to the guilt he suffered after he got an innocent man executed, reluctantly agrees to defend Allison. Garrison, with the help of Riva Montoya, his spunky girlfriend (and former drug-dealer's moll), comes to believe that Allison just might have been framed, especially when the ex-D.A. himself begins receiving mysterious death threats. It's no surprise when Garrison rallies and successfully acquits his client. Freedman's contrived plotting, so easily forgiven in his better books, seems trite here, as the villain conveniently unhinges, stalking Garrison with a high-powered rifle, and leaving pistol-packing Riva the chance to save the day. Still,despite a jocular, cliched narrative in which 'news spreads like wildfire,' and more than one character 'goes ballistic,' Freedman on an average day is usually better than most.

Read an Excerpt

The Disappearance

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The moon, two days past full, hangs low and forbiddingly cold, diamond hard in the late winter dead-of-night sky. A thirty-knot wind swooping out of the northeast earlier in the evening, blowing as hard as the summer Santa Anas, has brought the temperature down almost to freezing, which rarely happens this late, mid-March, people aren't prepared for it, even though they should be, given the terrible winter this new year has brought forth.

It's late now, well past midnight. Nothing is moving on the streets. All the lights are out in all the houses.

The girl sleeping on the futon hears a noise, a dull thump, like a body bumping into something. The sound is just loud enough to bring her to the edge of consciousness, somnolently turning her head to look up from where it's buried in a pillow.

There are three fourteen-year-old girls sleeping in the bedroom, eighth-graders having their little slumber party. They have been together most of the day, from mid-afternoon. Emma's mom dropped them off downtown a couple hours before dark.

They cruised the Paseo Nuevo mall, bought some tops and shorts at Nordstrom and The Gap, followed that with dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, and finished off downtown by going to a movie at the Metro 4 down the street (an R-rated movie with Johnny Depp, they brazened their way in with attitude, the movie people let the ID deal slide as long as you don't look like a sixth-grader). Emma bought the tickets. She's fourteen, going on twenty in her head, mature-looking for her age, with an innocent sensuality that oozes from her.

Their parents have just started letting them out at night on their own, as long as they're in by a reasonable hour. They are growing up fast.

Between the time they had dinner and the time they went to the movie they flirted with some older boys who were at their school before moving on to high school—Bolt or Thatcher or the public high school—but then they danced away, giggling and whispering. They liked the attention, but they aren't dating yet. Except for Emma, and her dates are secrets only her very closest friends share.

Their parents have given them plenty of money on top of their allowances (these mothers and fathers who comprise various combinations of married, separated, and divorced adults have their own weekend agendas which don't include their children, they are all, in their own self-wrapped-up ways, happy the girls can take care of themselves for an entire evening), so they cabbed home and watched Mad TV followed by Night Stand, a stupid-humor takeoff on a talk show. The guy who hosts the show lives in Montecito, the same as them. The girls have seen him in Starbucks, hunched over the News-Press, nursing a latte. Probably checking out his reviews. He's a minor celebrity, nobody to get excited about, not when there are real celebrities all over the place, John Cleese walking on the beach, Michael Douglas having lunch at Pane e Vino, Jodie Foster buying wine and brie at Von's.

They've stayed up way late, past midnight. After they were done watching TV, they went outside and smoked. Emma's house has a huge yard, more than two acres of manicured lawn and beautifully trimmed trees and voluptuous flowerbeds you can get lost in it easy, especially at night. Smoking is new to them—they know kids who have been doing it from when they were ten or eleven or even younger, but these are mostly Chicano public-school kids. At fourteen, though, eighth or ninth grade, lots of kids smoke, it isn't that big a deal.

Big deal or not, they don't want their parents to find out. They don't want the hassle of dealing with their parents about shit like that.

Glenna, Emma's mom, knows that Emma smokes. She hasn't actually caught her daughter with the burning evidence in her mouth, but she sees the signs. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't hassle Emma too much about it, like other mothers would, so most of the time the girls hang out at Emma's house. Glenna looks the other way about lots of things regular mothers wouldn't—having boys in the house when there aren't any adults around, watching any videos or TV shows they want no matter how R-rated-raunchy they are. Glenna is a woman of the '90s, she wants her daughter to be one, too. So she cuts Emma a lot of slack.

The house—it could truly be called a mansion, Montecito is full of houses like this—is one-story, the bedrooms located in two separate wings from the rest of the house. Emma's bedroom has French doors that open onto a flagstone patio, from which a path leads down the full acre of rolling lawn to the swimming pool and bathhouse. When the girls came back to Emma's room they took off their shoes and left them outside.

One of the French doors is open. The moon, just past full, bathes the doorway and part of the bedroom in pale yellow shadowy light.

Is something moving in the room? A person?

Whatever it is, it is out the door, pulling the door closed behind it, crossing the patio.

The girl feels she must be dreaming, a dream within a dream, the kind of dream that feels incredibly real, the kind of dream that if retained at all is always a nightmare in the remembering.

She isn't used to smoking and staying up so late, the way Emma and Hillary, the third girl in the slumber party, are. They're faster than her—she was tremendously flattered and surprised when Emma inexplicably decided, at the beginning of the school year, to admit her into her circle of friends.

Still, she's the third of the threesome. Which is why she is sleeping on the futon on the floor while the other two are in the twin beds. Not that she cares. Being in this company is enough, it doesn't matter where you sleep. Futons are fun, like camping out.

In her dream the French doors are now closed, the room is tranquil, empty. The moon shines on the carpet, a small shimmering pool. The figure is gone.

Then nothingness. The girl rolls over in her sleep and her unconscious mind goes blank.

Hillary and Lisa don't wake up until after ten—normal teenage weekend behavior. Emma isn't there; her unmade bed is rumpled. They figure she's gotten up earlier and gone out.

They lounge around in the room for a while, not sure what to do—go out into the house and look for Emma, or wait for her to come back. They watch some television, get dressed, wait.

Finally, hungry and bored, they wander through the house to the kitchen. Glenna—Mrs. Lancaster to the girls—is sitting on a stool at the island, drinking black coffee and reading the New York Sunday Times magazine. Her angular, striking face is devoid of makeup, and her straight black hair is pulled back in a ponytail; her long, slender feet are bare. A tall, athletic woman, she was awake early and played tennis for two hours on her private court with her coach and a friend.

"Emma still sleeping?" she asks casually, her eyes going back to her article. "How late were you guys up, anyway?"

The girls look at each other. "She's already got up, Mrs. Lancaster," Hillary says. "We thought she was in here."

Glenna shakes her head. "I haven't seen her all morning." She glances at the clock on the wall. It's almost 10:30. "She must be in the shower." She turns a page. There's some great clothing coming out this spring. She needs a trip to New York in the near future.

Glenna cocks her head for a moment, thinking. "Well, she's around somewhere." She lays her magazine aside and favors them with a smile. "She isn't much of a hostess, leaving the two of you to fend for yourselves. Do you want any breakfast?" She gets up from her perch, crosses to the refrigerator. "There's fresh orange juice, bagels, croissants. Do your parents let you drink coffee?" Without waiting for a reply she pours two small glasses of juice. "There's cereal, if you want it. In that cupboard," she points across the room.

Lisa hesitates before she speaks. "I had this really weird dream last night. More like a nightmare."

Lisa nods, uncertain. "It was like I woke up in Emma's bedroom, just the way it was when we went to sleep? And the door to the outside was open, and somebody was in there?"

Glenna looks at her more seriously. "Are you sure this was a dream?"

"I thought it was."

"Tell me what you thought you dreamed. Or saw," she says, becoming agitated. "What time did you think this was? In your dream."

"I don't know. It was really late. Like maybe morning, almost."

Glenna crosses to her. "Did you see something, Lisa?" Her eyes locked onto the girl's. "Look at me, Lisa. What did you see?"

It's early in the afternoon. Glenna and the girls had combed the property looking for Emma. When they didn't find her, Glenna called the police who referred her call to the county sheriff's department. She'd been reluctant to do so, but nothing felt right, and she figured it was better to err on the side of caution.

"What exactly did you see, Lisa?"

They are in the study of Emma's parents' house: Lisa, Hillary, Emma's mother, and the police detective. The detective from the sheriff's department, a big man with a hairbrush mustache, has asked the question. He's asking all the questions. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the missing kid blithely breezes in and wonders what all the commotion's about, but you still have to go through the drill.

Lisa is scrunched up on a couch, pushing hard against it. If she could force herself into it, through it, she would.

She's scared. She feels they're all angry at her. Like it's her fault Emma isn't here.

Glenna Lancaster crosses over and sits next to Lisa, taking the girl's fluttering hand. "It's okay, Lisa," she says soothingly, reassuringly. "What can you remember?" she asks the shaking girl.

Lisa shrugs, more of a wriggle. "I it was really dark. Something was moving, I thought. I mean I thought I saw something. But it was pretty dark," she ends lamely.

An hour later Doug Lancaster arrives at his home like a whirlwind, the tire-squeal of his turbo Bentley on the circular Italian-tile driveway announcing his arrival. Hair askew, still in his golf clothes, he charges into the house.

"What?" he asks Glenna, who has jumped up and runs towards the door, intercepting him in the front hallway. The entryway to their house is eighteen feet high; the massive front door was custom-built of imported Hawaiian koa wood, with floor-to-ceiling beveled windows on either side of the doorway refracting muted rainbow-colored light upon the marble floor.

The Lancasters had built the house a decade ago. They'd been painstaking in making sure everything was exactly as they desired. One example—Glenna and her designer had gone to Italy twice before they found a quarry that had the right marble for the entryway floor. She had supervised every detail of the construction, relentlessly pushing the architect and myriad contractors every day for a year and a half, seven days a week, driving everyone crazy. She went through the three best contractors in the country before she was done; but she got the house the way she wanted it, which is the only way she knows to do things.

"She's missing," she tells her husband. "Emma—"

"You already told me that on the phone," he interrupts her impatiently. "What's the deal? I mean how do you know—I mean what's—" His tongue can't keep up with the pace of his anxiety.

"Calm down," she says forcefully. "Come in and talk."

She steers him into the study, where the police detective, a man named Reuben Garcia, has been waiting for more than two hours. Contacting Doug in Santa Monica was no small feat—he hadn't been in his hotel room and it took forever to get through to him on the back nine at Bel Air Country Club, where he was playing golf with some of the heavies from NBC.

Hillary is gone now. Her parents came and hustled her away. Lisa, the cause for this alarm, is still there: Garcia wouldn't let her leave until Doug Lancaster could get home and hear her story, fragmentary as it is, firsthand. Garcia doesn't want any problems later on down the line, such as an irate father with a ton of clout becoming upset because he didn't hear the story himself from the mouth of this small, increasingly terrified fourteen-year-old girl.

Susan Jaffe, Lisa's mother, is with her daughter. Lisa is her only child. They live alone in a small house in the affordable area of the lower Riviera, in Santa Barbara proper. Susan and Lisa's father have been divorced for a long time. Susan's raised her daughter on her own, and done it while going to Santa Barbara College of Law at night. She's worked for the county for six years now; her salary is decent, enough that she can afford to send her daughter to Elgin, the best private middle school in the area, which is where Lisa met Emma.

Still, Susan makes less in a year than Doug Lancaster draws in salary per month. His salary is for show: he owns four television stations, including the local NBC affiliate, his flagship station. He has a lot of power and he isn't shy about using it, generally for good reasons—he isn't a bully. But the power is there, and everyone who knows what's going on in this town knows it, including Susan Jaffe, a county employee, and Reuben Garcia, a local deputy.

"This is my husband, Doug Lancaster," Glenna says to Susan and Garcia. "Susan is Lisa's mother. You've met her, haven't you?" she asks her husband, whose pulse rate is coming down slightly, now that he's finished his frenzied drive up the coast and is in his own house.

"Of course," he responds quickly, diplomatically. "You'll have to forgive me. I'm kind of discombobulated right now, since I don't know what's going on." He doesn't remember the woman at all; she's nice enough looking in a generic way. Much like her daughter, cowering next to her on the couch. "Your daughter was very good in the play, as I recall."

"She had a small part, but she was good, I agree."

"So what's the deal?" Doug says now, having dealt with as much of the amenities as he's going to. "Are we sure Emma couldn't have gone out earlier, with a friend or something? You're positive she hasn't called, and in the rush no one picked up the phone?"

Glenna, biting her lip, shakes her head impatiently. "There were no calls. I'm sure."

Garcia answers the other question. "We've had calls out to everyone we can think of who knows your daughter, Mr. Lancaster. We're concerned."

Doug rocks back on his heels. "What do you mean?" he asks slowly, sounding dumb to himself as the words come out of his mouth.

Garcia extends his hand towards the mother and daughter sitting on the sofa. "Lisa here might have seen something."

Doug looks at Lisa. "Seen something?"

"Sit down," Glenna tells him. She steers him to an armchair across from the sofa where the girl sits.

He folds himself into the chair, his eyes fixed on the small girl eight feet across from him, who is shrinking into herself as he stares at her.

"Tell Mr. Lancaster what you saw," Garcia instructs Lisa. "What you think you might have seen," he corrects himself. He isn't committing to anything, not yet.

The sound of the bump brought Lisa out of a deep sleep, the deepest part of sleep that comes about two hours after you first lose consciousness, where whatever primitive sensors are working make you feel like you're a hundred feet under the ocean, all murky and indefinable.

It took her a few seconds to realize where she was. Then she knew. She was in Emma Lancaster's bedroom, sleeping on a futon.

She was groggy. Her mouth was dry. She wished she'd brought a glass of water to bed with her, but this was only her second sleep-over and she wouldn't know how to get to the kitchen from here in the dark, she'd probably trip an alarm and freak everyone out.

She could make her way to Emma's bathroom. She could drink out of the faucet. She rolled over on her side, started to push her quilt down off her body.